Over the years, I’ve compiled an informal list of the journalistic phrases that make me cringe. “International community” is one. “Community” implies intimate knowledge and shared values. If anything is not a community, it’s the nations of the world. “American Jewish leader” is another. “Leader” implies followers and “American Jewish leader” implies a significant following among American Jews. Yet if you asked American Jews to name the men (and they are almost all men) who run America’s major Jewish groups, you’d get mostly blank stares.

The implication is that there’s a conflict between the White House, which want a softer line on Iran, and American Jews who - represented by their “leaders” - want a tougher one. It’s an influential storyline. And it’s utter nonsense.

In truth, the only person who can legitimately claim to speak for American Jews on the subject of Iran is the very guy American Jewish “leaders” oppose: Barack Obama. Look at the evidence. In 2012, Mitt Romney slammed Obama for not supporting tougher sanctions against Iran and for not more explicitly pledging that, if sanctions fail to curb Tehran’s nuclear program, the U.S. will attack. In so doing, Romney road-tested the critique leveled by Benjamin Netanyahu and many American Jewish “leaders.”

The result? Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote. According to an exit poll by J Street (the only organization to ask such a question), Jewish voters preferred Obama to Romney on Iran by a margin of 58 to 26 percent.

That may be an exaggeration. And American Jewish “leaders” might argue that they’re not obligated to represent American Jews as a whole, only the ones in their organizations. Still, it’s extraordinary to watch American Jewish “leaders” play such a prominent role in undermining an Iran policy that, according to all the evidence, most American Jews support.

How can this be? Partly, it’s because American Jewish “leaders” are older, wealthier and more religiously observant than other American Jews, demographic characteristics that correlate with hawkishness. Partly, it’s because American Jewish “leaders” are more responsive than other American Jews to the concerns of Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly hates Obama’s nuclear diplomacy.

But most importantly, it’s because American Jewish “leaders”—more than most American Jews—see Jew-hatred as a pervasive force in world affairs, as powerful today as it was in the early twentieth century. In 2009, the ADL’s Abraham Foxman, declared that “global anti-Semitism [is] . . . reaching a peak this year that we haven’t seen since the tragic days of World War II.” In 2010, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations gave a speech entitled, “Is It 1939?”

In claiming that the gentile world’s view of Jews has not fundamentally changed, American Jewish “leaders” have made Iran exhibit A. For two decades, they have described it as the Nazi Germany of our time, motivated primarily by a hunger for world conquest and a thirst for Jewish blood. Such a regime, the argument goes, is impervious to the normal calculations of national self-interest and the normal dynamics of diplomatic compromise. It will respond only to unrelenting economic and military pressure.

It is this basic assumption: that the Iranian regime - although brutal and despotic - has legitimate national interests and the capacity for rational judgment, which informs Obama’s diplomacy. It is this basic assumption that inclines him to believe that a final nuclear deal can only be reached via compromise, not the unilateral dictates codified in the new Iran sanctions bill. And it is precisely this assumption that American Jewish “leaders” cannot accept, because if Iran is not Nazi Germany, then 2014 is nothing like 1939. And if 2014 is nothing like 1939, then American Jews need Jewish organizations that recognize that today, many of the key challenges facing the Jewish people stem not from our weakness but from our power.

That’s what’s at stake in the struggle over Iran policy currently roiling Washington, a struggle that has the potential to reshape not just American foreign policy, but the landscape of institutional American Jewish life.

President Barack Obama speaks at the Saban Forum at the Willard Hotel in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 7, 2013. AP

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